Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Intercom VS Backbone.js

Compare Intercom VS Backbone.js and see what are their differences

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Intercom logo Intercom

Intercom is a customer relationship management and messaging tool for web businesses. Build relationships with users to create loyal customers.

Backbone.js logo Backbone.js

Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events
  • Intercom Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-05
  • Backbone.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

Intercom

$ Details
-
Release Date
2011 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
California
Founder(s)
Ciaran Lee
Employees
500 - 999

Intercom features and specs

  • User-friendly Interface
    Intercom offers an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, making it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise.
  • Comprehensive Customer Communication Tools
    It provides a suite of tools for live chat, email marketing, in-app messaging, and customer support, all of which can be accessed in one place.
  • Customization and Integration
    Intercom allows for extensive customization and integrates with various third-party applications, enabling businesses to tailor the platform to meet their specific needs.
  • Automation Capabilities
    The platform supports automated workflows, which can save time and ensure consistent customer interactions.
  • Customer Data Management
    Intercom collects and analyzes customer data, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences that can inform business strategies.

Possible disadvantages of Intercom

  • Cost
    Intercom can be expensive, particularly for small businesses or startups. The pricing model is based on the number of users and features, which can add up quickly.
  • Complexity for Advanced Features
    While basic features are user-friendly, some of the more advanced functionalities can be complex and may require a steeper learning curve.
  • Limited Reporting
    The reporting and analytics features, while useful, are sometimes considered less comprehensive compared to specialized analytics platforms.
  • Customer Support
    Some users have reported that Intercom's own customer support can be slow to respond, which can be frustrating when dealing with urgent issues.
  • Notification Overload
    The platform can generate a high volume of notifications, which can be overwhelming and may require careful management to avoid interrupting workflow.

Backbone.js features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Backbone.js is minimal and lightweight, which means it has a small footprint and adds very little overhead to your project.
  • Flexibility
    Backbone.js provides a flexible structure to developers by allowing them to build their own MVC or MVP architectures using models, views, collections, and routers.
  • Ease of Integration
    Backbone.js can be easily integrated with other libraries and frameworks, such as jQuery or underscore.js, enhancing its capabilities without much difficulty.
  • Large Community
    Backbone.js has been around for a long time, resulting in a large community and a plethora of plugins and extensions that can be leveraged.
  • Detailed Documentation
    The official site offers comprehensive documentation which includes tutorials, examples, and a detailed API reference, aiding developers to understand and utilize the library efficiently.

Possible disadvantages of Backbone.js

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    New developers might find Backbone.js difficult to learn due to its non-opinionated nature and lack of enforced structure.
  • Sparse In-Built Features
    Backbone.js provides only the basic building blocks, requiring developers to write more boilerplate code or rely on external libraries for additional functionalities.
  • Outdated
    As newer frameworks and libraries (like React, Vue, and Angular) have emerged with more robust features and better performance, Backbone.js has somewhat fallen out of favor in modern development practices.
  • Event Binding Complexity
    Managing event bindings in Backbone.js can become complex and sometimes messy in large applications, which can lead to difficult maintenance and debugging.
  • Limited Two-Way Data Binding
    Backbone.js does not provide two-way data binding out-of-the-box, unlike other frameworks such as Angular, necessitating additional code to sync views and models.

Analysis of Intercom

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Intercom is generally viewed as a good solution for businesses seeking to improve customer communication and support. Its robust features and flexibility make it a strong contender in the customer engagement space.

Why this product is good

  • Intercom is considered a good platform because it offers a comprehensive suite of tools for customer engagement. It integrates messaging, live chat, and help desk functionalities, providing a seamless experience for both users and customers. The platform is known for its user-friendly interface, customization options, and advanced integration capabilities with various third-party applications.

Recommended for

    Intercom is recommended for businesses of all sizes that wish to enhance their customer service and communication strategies. It is particularly beneficial for companies that want to offer personalized customer interactions through messaging, automate customer support processes, and gain insights from customer interactions. It's suitable for SaaS businesses, e-commerce platforms, and tech startups that prioritize customer experience.

Intercom videos

Intercom Review & Tutorial - How to Use Intercom for Websites

More videos:

  • Review - Intercom Software Review, Engage, Respond, Educate
  • Review - BTI V6 1200m Bluetooth & Intercom Review

Backbone.js videos

Introduction to Backbone.js

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to Backbone.js
  • Review - Backbone.js Code Review w Backbone.js Mentor Jonathon

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Intercom and Backbone.js)
Customer Support
100 100%
0% 0
JavaScript Framework
0 0%
100% 100
CRM
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Intercom and Backbone.js

Intercom Reviews

  1. Eleanor Bennett
    · Digital Marketing Specialist at Logit.io ·
    An essential communication tool

    Intercom provides a lot of value to us. From live chat to email marketing and even helping us to create support documentation, Intercom handles a lot of key moving parts that are essential to keeping customers happy.


9 Best Tidio Alternatives Compared
Intercom is a customer engagement platform that serves mostly large and enterprise businesses. The software is known for its versatility, offering live chat, messaging, and in-app support, combined with advanced automation, AI bots, and customer data tracking.
Source: www.tidio.com
10 Best Freshdesk Alternatives for Businesses in 2024
Intercom is an alternative that excels in self-service support. It enables businesses to communicate and engage with their customers in real-time.
Top 11 Freshdesk Alternatives for 2024 (Ranked & Rated)
Intercom provides a useful suite of tools designed to improve your customer engagement. As a Freshdesk alternative, Intercom ticks several boxes when it comes to features:
9 Best ManyChat Alternatives & Competitors in 2024
Intercom’s main features are its helpdesk interfaces and chatbots. But it also includes lead qualification and nurturing functionalities. It offers product tours and resolution bots that can solve many customer concerns at once, freeing your reps’ time for the most complex queries. You can also make use of its Messenger integration and a provided chatbot to improve your...
Source: www.tidio.com
Top 13 Freshdesk alternatives and competitors for 2024
Intercom offers customer service software while also extending its platform to marketing and sales. Intercom is a newer platform to the CX market and has adopted AI and automation capabilities to keep up with business trends. Intercom features Intercom Messenger, a communication tool that provides customers with self-service or live support options.
Source: www.zendesk.com

Backbone.js Reviews

20 Next.js Alternatives Worth Considering
A veteran on the scene, Backbone.js is all about giving structure to your JavaScript-heavy applications. It’s standing the test of time, enabling you to keep your data logic and display logic neatly side by side, all while being lightweight.
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
Backbone.js is based on the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. The library supports seven components: Models, Views, Collections, Routers, Events, Sync, and Options. Backbone.js also provides an asynchronous communication layer that allows the application to communicate with a backend service.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Backbone.JS is a lightweight JavaScript library that provides a framework for developing structured and scalable web applications. It offers a set of tools for building client-side applications that interact with RESTful APIs. Backbone.JS is well-suited for developing single-page applications (SPAs) where most of the user interface is rendered in the browser, rather than...
Source: www.bocasay.com
20 Best JavaScript Frameworks For 2023
Backbone.js is a JavaScript-based framework that connects to an API via a RESTful JSON interface. Backbone.js is known for being small and light because it only requires jQuery and one JavaScript library, Underscore.js, to use the entire library.
Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development
Backbone JS is a JavaScript framework based on the MVP app design. As the name suggests, it acts as a strong backbone to your project. It is lightweight in nature and hence, is considered ideal for developing single-page applications. It offers a simplistic frontend and makes the best use of JavaScript functions.
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Backbone.js should be more popular than Intercom. It has been mentiond 17 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Intercom mentions (7)

  • Enhancing Customer Support with a Live Chat Widget on Your Website
    Intercom: Famous for its conversational marketing focus, Intercom’s live chat widget offers features like proactive messaging and lead qualification. It also supports deep personalization for enhanced customer engagement. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • I started affiliate marketing, but with a twist
    Use chatbots to automate customer service: Chatbots use natural language processing to communicate with customers and answer their questions. By integrating chatbots into your affiliate marketing strategy, you can automate customer service and increase engagement with potential customers. This can lead to more sales and higher commissions. (Crisp, Intercom). Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to embed a web application into another website via API?
    I am trying to create an application that will work on a customer's website. Much like tawk.to or intercom.com. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Here's how I'd figure out the go-to-market for a Customer Support SaaS
    My way of doing marketing starts with figuring out what my overall project will (or will not) be. In this case, I looked at the vendors like Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, or Help Scout. They all have whizbang features such as live-chat, collaboration stuffs, automations and workflows. They bill per contact and addons. I’d emphasize a straightforward, fuss-free angle instead. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Chat widget with react.js
    I wanted to know the best practices of developing a widget. So I went through the popular implementations of it. I liked Intercom's widget very much. It is written in React. I analyzed how it works. The minimal javascript is loaded async on the webpage. It is injecting an iframe with id intercom-frame. That iframe has a script in it's head with a source URl. Obviously it is React bundle. Source: about 3 years ago
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Backbone.js mentions (17)

  • JavaScript Views, the Hard Way – A Pattern for Writing UI
    Https://backbonejs.org/#View There is also a github repo that has examples of MVC patterns adapted to the web platform. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • JavaScript evolution: From Lodash and Underscore to vanilla
    Underscore was created by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator of Backbone.js) in 2009 to provide a set of utility functions that JavaScript lacked at the time. It was also created to work with Backbone.js, but it slowly became a favorite among developers who needed utility functions that they could just call and get stuff done with without having to worry about the inner implementations and browser compatibility. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • React is 10 years old
    Got it thanks for the context. I've read the web app and it seems to me it is just https://backbonejs.org/ re-written in Typescript and allows JSX. I'm very certain Typescript and JSX will have improved the DX for Backbone like apps, but it doesn't address all of the other issues that teams had with Backbone. e.g. Cyclical event propagation, state stored in the DOM (i.e. Appendchild is error prone in large code... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs
    Even further nowadays, docs are created using Docusaurus. I don't have problem with it but documentation should be good (eye) friendly than easy to write. Why not be creative while writing docs such as - Backbone.js - https://backbonejs.org Or https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html as code annotation. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • The Emperor's New Library
    What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Intercom and Backbone.js, you can also consider the following products

Zendesk - Zendesk is a beautiful, lightweight help-desk solution.

AngularJS - AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop.

Freshdesk - Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software that lets you support customers through traditional channels like phone and email, social channels like Facebook and Twitter, and your own branded community

ExpressJS - Sinatra inspired web development framework for node.js -- insanely fast, flexible, and simple

Drift - A messaging app that helps you grow your business.

ember.js - A JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web apps